A couple of days later, when they're more caught up on cleanup and things are falling back into a routine and Angband Leareth seems more settled, Vanyel goes looking for Bella. It's been in the back of his mind for days that he probably needs to do this, and - he doesn't want to at all, actually, but it's important so he steels himself and does it anyway. 

"Hey. If you're, um, not busy, I think we should talk." 

"How long do you need? I can put this down for now."

"I'm not sure." Right now he's wanting to say his mandatory apology and run, but - that probably isn't going to fix the actual problem, here. "Could be a while - I can come back when you're done for the day...?" 

"I'll knock off in two candlemarks until around bedtime."

"All right." And he goes and sings to Leareth from the doorway of his room for the next couple of candlemarks, it's his most common downtime activity right now, and then heads back to meet her. 

She is sitting on the roof of her new bungalow watching things happen around her but hops down to meet him. "Come in?"

He nods, a bit stiffly, and comes in. Looks around. "This is really nice." 

"It has to be. Elves. Go ahead and sit down. What can I do for you?"

"- I wanted to apologize for, um, probably being kind of rude to you in the debrief meeting." He takes a deep breath. "And...I feel like we haven't started out on the best foot, here, and it seemed good to - try to address that." 

"- address it how?"

Aaaaaaah can she possibly make this easier instead of maximally hard Vanyel is aware that this is an uncharitable thought, he's been having them for days. 

"I don't know. Just - with the things you were frustrated about, I think you must've been coming into this with - pretty different expectations from what I would've had? I mean, it...makes sense, that you were upset, we put you in a tough position. I, just..." 

Possibly he is not as ready for attempting this conversation as he'd hoped, because he still has no idea how to put the thing he means into words. 

:You can do this, Chosen: Yfandes sends, reassuring. :Just try to relax a little, it'll help: 

Vanyel feels like this is easier said than done and not the most helpful advice she could give him, but the wordless reassurance does help a little. 

"Yes, it's been made clear that my expectations were incorrect."

Vanyel tries not to grit his teeth, or get too defensive, it's really not going to help. "I'm sorry. That - must've hurt, to find out after the fact. And, I'm not sure how but we probably could've been better at communicating, somehow. There's a concept Leareth has, of - how people tend to assume other people are like them unless they've explicitly noticed otherwise? And I guess I assumed, you've worked with Heralds, you'd have the same - general priors - that I do..." Helpless shrug. "In hindsight that's not actually obvious, and - I don't know. I'm sorry things went the way they did."  

"I worked with you," she says. "Your younger self. I didn't know the exact contents of your conversations with him, and I guess I assumed too much - rapport transfer, based on how I'd think of it if I met someone who was me."

Vanyel finds his shoulders tensing. He forces himself to relax. "I did - update on that. But - hmm, well, it'd be different if you knew another me who was my age. I remember myself at eighteen and I do not have much faith in my eighteen-year-old self's judgement. Maybe you at eighteen were less of a mess than me and so it'd be different..." Vanyel lifts a hand and lets it fall. "He mostly talked about the therapy you did with him. Which - I'm so glad he has you, he's going to be much happier than I've been, but - it's sort of the case that you're helping him grow in a different direction than the one I did, and that makes it harder to compare, right?" 

"Yes, that makes sense."

"I've changed a lot in the last - gods, fourteen, fifteen years? And - part of that was the war with Karse. You know, I guess I changed in ways that I didn't necessary like, when I noticed them happening at the time, but - that I think were adaptive, for fighting wars, and that I'm glad I had when this war dropped on my head. And - some other things happened, that shifted how I think about trust. Honestly I look back at myself from the early 790s and it feels like I was way too trusting of the people around me. I - hadn't seen, yet, how you can have a whole lot of people who're basically on the same side, and trying really, really hard to do the right thing, and still screw it up in each other's eyes, and harm each other's goals..." 

"War does change people, yeah, that makes sense."

It's not even just the war, Vanyel thinks - it might not be mostly the war - it's, just, everything that happened in the years of his conversations with Leareth - everything that happened after that one awful night when Yfandes walked away– This is not a helpful memory to be dwelling on right now and he tries to shove it away. 

"I think I was pretty defensive, the other day," he says, looking down again. "Because - well, from my end it seemed like we'd just won a war with Melkor, who trust me is a thousand times scarier than anyone I fought on the Karsite side, and - with fewer casualties than just about any single battle in the war with Karse. I think we made some mistakes but overall we did pretty damned well and - I guess it hurt, to feel attacked after trying so hard for so long to do the right thing here. A lot of our interactions with you were - trying to make it as little as possible a gamble, to cordon off how much you could harm our cause if you weren't trustworthy. And - gods, I've been on the other side of that and it doesn't feel good, so I'm sorry. But - it felt like a pretty reasonable decision process to be running, given the information we actually had at the time, when we were at war with Melkor and we thought we had a way to win but it was only going to have a chance of working if it caught him totally unawares, and also he'd managed to capture Leareth of all people and so it felt like it might not be possible to be paranoid enough."

"Yeah, that's about how Maitimo explained it.

Rúmil told me - Melkor uses the good things about people against them, the impulse to be trusting and talk things out and try to understand people. So it's an indicator that you were - set up in a responsible defensive posture, that you didn't do that with me. And realistically it was much more important to be set up in a responsible defensive posture, since you were fighting Melkor.

That having been said if I were actually working for Melkor you'd all have been screwed regardless. I'm a subtle artist with an interplanar earcuff."

Vanyel's shoulders sag a little. "I figured. Though - I mean, we were already screwed in that case, right, from the moment it was obvious you could find and contact us at all, having more conversations with you didn't increase the threat-surface-area much. Or I figured, anyway, possibly Leareth would've caught something I didn't."

He fidgets with the hem of his tunic. "I'm - not used to thinking of 'the impulse to be trusting' as an uncomplicatedly good thing. Though trying to understand people and be charitable to their reasoning when it's different from yours is closer to just-always-good - I think those are pretty different motions. Trusting people and being transparent is good if you're working with trustworthy people who want to cooperate, and bad with adversarial actors, and - I guess a lot of my work has been with some degree of adversaries. Even the Council - they're not value-aligned with Heralds, not really, they care about Valdemar too but they have their own agendas and it'd be stupid to trust them and be open with them the way I am with, say, Savil. - and I can't even trust Savil with everything, I didn't trust her - or any of the Heralds, really - to reason clearly about the Leareth situation. Their Companions still have the issue that made Yfandes walk out on me until she'd fixed it, for one."

He frowns. "I think some of what we were trying to protect against was - you not being as trustworthy or value-aligned as my alt thought. Which, I mean, almost no one is as trustworthy as he was claiming you are. I am updating very hopefully toward him being right, even if his decision to trust you initially seems overly hasty to me, and - well, now is a much better time to actually do the talking things out. Which is - why I'm trying to."

"I appreciate that, it probably wasn't exactly appealing to come here today."

"Not really, no." Vanyel takes a deep breath. "I - gods, I don't know how to say this right, but. I hope we can become friends on our own terms, now that things are less on fire and there's more slack for it, just, I don't think you should be thinking of me as the same person as my alt, and - definitely not expecting me to automatically have 'rapport' with you because he does. It - I'm sorry, just, it kind of made me bristle when you said that."